EXCLUSIVE:
As media veterans go, there are few who can match the quiet achiever records of Better Homes & Gardens‘ Graham Ross.
At 44 years his 2GB radio show The Garden Clinic is the longest running radio show in Australia to remain in the same slot, on the same station with the same presenter.
He’s been a staple on Australian television screens for over four decades.
“I’ve been on television pretty much every week, on one program or another for 46 years. The thing that’s interesting from my perspective, is that I now have grandchildren whose parents were children, watching Better Homes with their parents,” he tells TV Tonight.
Behind the scenes, 76 year old Ross is a founder and Chair of the Australian Garden Council, been President of Horticultural Media Association Australia NSW branch, Principal of Ryde School of Horticultural TAFE and an ambassador for numerous charities. His list of accolades and awards, including an Order of Australia, is extensive.
Yet he wasn’t the first choice as gardener for Seven’s new lifestyle show Better Homes & Gardens, a project developed under Rupert Murdoch’s nephew, Matt Hambry.
“I wasn’t the original gardener. They’d been shooting for about four months with a another non-television gardening presenter. It was a fairly odd combination of production, because it wasn’t a Seven production,” he recalls.
“Matt Hambry had this idea, which was the first in the world to actually flip a magazine -not just the odd story, but the whole magazine- onto television.
“But he didn’t have television skills. He hired another guy who sort of took control, and they then submitted it to Seven and said, ‘This is what we’ve been working on, we’re ready to go.’ But they died a death when they saw the gardening segment. There were one or two other bits that they fiddled around with, but the gardening, Seven said, ‘No way.’
“I said, ‘You don’t know how successful this program is going to be’”
“I said, ‘You don’t know how successful this program is going to be. I’ve been working on two different programs on the ABC that are similar formats. You’ve obviously put a lot of thought and a lot of money into it, but the gardener is wrong.’ And they said, ‘Will you do the program?’
“The next morning, we filmed in my home garden and the producer was David Barbour (The Block), very talented producer, and we’re still good mates to this day.”
In 1988 Ross had already had 10 years on television, first on ABC’s Lookout followed by Our World of Gardening, Home Grown and Garden Australia which would be renamed as Gardening Australia.
“I was determined to get ABC gardening out of the studio”
“I was determined to get ABC gardening out of the studio. It had been in the studio nationally, with Kevin Heinze in Melbourne, Alan Seale in Sydney, and the other states were all basically studio based,” he says.
“While we were doing Garden Australia (with wife Sandra Ross) they upped the production to a live 90 minute, program, called The Weekender. 90% of it looked like what Better Homes is today. This was seven years before Better Homes, six years before Burke’s Backyard.
“So it was the first real lifestyle series, and we were the first to broadcast on AusSat, which gave us a massive footprint right across the whole country.”
“He can only fall over and then we’ll get rid of him!’”
Ross had also become the first Horticulturalist journalist on TV, working across 11AM, Seven National News and Newsnight. When he joined Seven in 1980 it was a baptism of fire.
“The Chief of Staff and the EP said, ‘Oh, well, he can only fall over and then we’ll get rid of him!’” he laughs.
“You had to come up with a story, get it approved or rejected or amended, then put into a slot to get a crew, find a location, go and shoot it. That might mean a chopper flight or a two hour drive in one of the old red falcons. Then you’d come back with the interview and then you had to edit it yourself on a six plate Steenbeck, and add music to it.
“So I was thrown in the deep end pretty substantially because they were skills I didn’t have, but I learned them pretty quickly, fortunately. These stories were generally about 5-7 minutes long for 11AM. If it was what we might call a ‘hard news’ gardening story, they would say ’Can you cut it down to 30 seconds and we’ll put it in the News tonight?’
“I joined Seven in 1980 for three years, left to go to two other networks and then rejoined in 1990.”
“We hereby resign. We’ll see you in court”
When he and Sandra Ross learned ABC wanted to shift Garden Australia to Gardening Australia in Hobart with Peter Cundall, tempers frayed.
“We both resigned, and just sent them a fax, and I said, ‘We hereby resign. We’ll see you in court’ and signed it. That was in November ‘88. A week later, we ended up at Channel Nine because Packer wanted to screw Burkie,” he remembers.
“We left Nine. Who would want to work at Nine, because Packer had just bought it back from Bond? It was a very unpleasant place to be. So we eventually resigned from there at the beginning of 1990, came back to Channel Seven.”
Better Homes & Gardens was also very nearly known in another guise in its early pilots.
“They were producing a program called Families with Hazel Hawke as the host. And when it got closer to being finalised, they said, ‘We can’t use Hazel’ and there was a bit of a bloodletting meeting with (producer) Peter Abbott and a lot of executives from the network at the time.
“It was a bit homespun. Hazel was a lovely person, but there wasn’t television talent there to carry it off. Somebody went down the corridor, heard this voice, and Noni Hazlehurst was recording something for another program altogether. The person said, ’That’s the voice I want. They looked in the studio and saw Noni.’ Eventually John Jarratt and Noni became hosts.”
“We knocked off Friends and it never, ever recovered”
Its initial outing was a 30 minute lifestyle show on Tuesday nights running back to back with The Great Outdoors.
“The biggest program on Australian television at that time was Friends. It outrated everything, and it was on Tuesday night at 7:30. We went to air, a week later we knocked off Friends and it never, ever recovered. I’ve got the stats in my study at work,” Ross boasts.
“Better Homes eventually grew to an hour and of course, many years ago, it went to 90 minutes.”
There was even a brief dalliance with Saturday nights before it settled on the all-important Friday slot in 2005.
“Friday was critical for advertising and it was critical because that was the traditional timeslot that had been set up for (DIY builds) on the weekend, or to cook on the weekend or to go to the nursery and get all your plants.”
As it approaches 30 years on Australian television, hosted by Johanna Griggs since 2005, Ross has notched up more than 3000 gardening segments.
“The highlights would have to be filming in Buckingham Palace for the first and only time by a television crew. When the Queen was there, she came out when we were filming. And we were filming the garden at the back of Number 10 Downing Street. A photograph of me knocking on the door of Number 10 keeps popping up whenever there’s an election, saying ‘Why didn’t you let the the gardener in, he would have done a better job?’” he laughs.
“Overseas gardens we filmed in Austria, Germany, throughout Great Britain, and we filmed the Queen and the entire Royal Family coming to Chelsea. We were the first and the only overseas crew that has ever filmed Chelsea. The BBC hated anyone else, and hated us because we were also commercial, as well as being from Down Under.”
“She was corresponding back to Philip three weeks before she passed away”
He also recalls Australian landscaper Phillip Johnson winning Chelsea Flower Show in his 2013 with his billabong design.
“It cost him $3 million and pretty much sent him bust, but he created this garden, and formed a relationship, because she was absolutely enamored with the garden, with Her Majesty the Queen. It was the first time in history that a garden won the Gold Medal and the Best in Show, and the judges were unanimous,” he continues.
“He’s rebuilt it 20 times in size up at Olinda and the Dandenongs. We went and filmed it about nine months before it was opened last year and and he kept in contact with the Queen about the garden. She was corresponding back to Philip three weeks before she passed away. Now you can’t read too much between the lines, but I can tell you, the Queen’s son is coming to visit later this year….” he teases.
“There has been communication at the highest level in Victoria.”
Over the decades has Better Homes also seen changes in its diversity? Yes, Ross acknowledges with a caveat.
“The show has had to develop. You could count the dramatic changes, that Better Homes has made in content on one hand. It’s been consistent in its subject matter, but it has changed in the way it relates to children and the way it relates to teenagers, very much,” he insists.
“The show has never set out to separate or highlight anybody”
“It does include (diverse Australians), but it doesn’t highlight them. That’s one of the things the show has never done. I’ve done many stories on First Nations people. In fact, quite a few of us have done stories with First Nations people. The show has never set out to separate or highlight anybody. We just include everybody.
“The big show gardens of Australia, the really beautiful gardens, are expensive to maintain and I have to say those gardens today are being protected by gay men. As the chairman of the Australian Garden Council, we owe them a great debt, because they are spending millions to look after those gardens. They’ve often paid millions for them, and they have a passion and a talent that is just so valuable today.
“They are supporting and buying gardens and creating, reviving some of these stunning gardens, and I’m enormously professionally indebted to them, because they are really doing a brilliant job.”
“I’m just a crazy plant nerd”
Ross is currently signed to Seven until the end of 2025 and considers his future is at “the behest of management.”
“I love it. I’ve got good health, and I just have an enormous passion for people and a passion for plants. I just try to relate in my own garden, or in someone else’s garden, what they’re doing, or what I’m doing in mine,” he explains.
“And of course, I’m just a crazy plant nerd, a plant nut, and I’m sitting here talking to you with my veggie patch, which has got about 12 different vegetables, and I’ve got sweet peas coming up, and a whole bed of poppies coming up. And my grandson’s doing pruning here because he’s off school from holidays. Fantastic.”
Better Homes & Gardens screens 7:30pm Fridays on Seven / 7TWO.
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